The maker of Orange Pi boards, Shenzhen Xunlong Software, has partnered with Canonical to launch Orange Pi app store, allowing developers to gain a simple mechanism to share their applications, projects and scripts with the Orange Pi community.
The store relies on snaps instead of deb packages, with snaps allowing a secure distributions of apps bundled with all their dependencies, which according to Canonical can decreased the time for an half an hour installation process to just a few seconds.
The community has already contributed hundreds of snaps in the Ubuntu snap store, including openHAB for home automation, Rocket.chat self-hosted chat platform, NextCloud for cloud storage, and wifi-ap for networking.
You can get them from the App store, but installing a snap from the command line is easy, for example:
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sudo snap install rocketchat-server |
However, I cannot find any Ubuntu Core image for Orange Pi Boards yet on Ubuntu Core Getting Started page. It would also work on other operating systems like Arch Linux ARM, Gentoo, Ubuntu (not Core), Debian, etc… by installing snapd.
You can also learn how to create your own branded app store for your board or community on Ubuntu website.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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Better support- a step in the right direction for Xunlong, and smart marketing on Ubuntu’s part.
But I doubt it solves Xunlong’s core issue of rushing to newer models before even bare minimum support for existing models.
Or should I assume WiFi can now work on the Orange PiZero?
Or that SATA over USB2 “innovation” really makes sense now ? 🙂
@cnxsoft:
This sentence from this huge compilation of marketing BS (it’s nothing more than that) you linked to in your first sentence made my day: ‘The Orange Pi is based on a quad-core 64 bit ARM Cortex A7 Allwinner SoC’
I hope the snaps in this ‘whitelabel store’ all are already both arm64/armhf, I hope the individuals hired/responsible for providing kernel/drivers for the various and different Orange Pi boards don’t rely on hardware vendor ‘BSP’ using Allwinner’s insanely buggy/vulnerable kernel/drivers and I also hope users thinking this move would be in the right direction know what ‘Ubuntu Core’ and the ‘Snap store’ concept really are…
Can anyone please explain to me whether it’s possible to run this ‘Ubuntu Core’/Snaps thingie without handing over control of my device to some 3rd parties somewhere on the Internet?
BTW: Armbian’s build system could be used with just a few hours of work to provide gadget and vendor kernel snaps for all supported SBC and not just Oranges. Fortunately no one knows…
It’s quite easy to make snaps. There are tutorials at https://tutorials.ubuntu.com/
It appears that Shenzhen Xunlong Software will be hosting themselves the store.
Some snaps might be specific to the hardware features of the OrangePi boards.
While others will be generic networking services and will run everywhere (as long as they are compiled for ARM*).